


Quiet, Useless Declarations

by Bhelryss



Series: FE Rarepair Week 2017 [3]
Category: Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, minor selena, prompt: adventure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-01
Updated: 2017-08-01
Packaged: 2018-12-09 16:58:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11673306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bhelryss/pseuds/Bhelryss
Summary: Fire Emblem "Rarepair" Week: Day ThreePrompt: AdventureShip: Knoll/Lyon





	Quiet, Useless Declarations

Knoll had barely woken up, light from the windows in the library finally streaming in strong enough to hit his out of the way table, stacked with books and research and cold but full cups of tea. He’d barely woken up, and Lyon was there, paler than usual and a slant to his shoulders that was alarming. Startled, Knoll quickly got to his feet and reached out a hand to his prince, only to pull back at the way Lyon’s expression fell so quickly. Something was horribly wrong.

“Is it the stone?” Knoll asks, afraid to hear the answer. What could have gone so wrong with the research teams, in so quick a timespan as a single night, that could make Lyon look so...

“No.” 

“A ripple?” Knoll asks, gentler for the worry in his heart. He’d never seen Lyon so...empty. It was as though the passion he’d come to know and love had simply, guttered out, leaving the prince with no spark left in him. He was frightened of the simple lack in Lyon’s voice, no inflection, nothing. 

Finally, he cracked. “My  _ father _ ,” Prince Lyon says, and it is a mournful howl that disturbs the quiet of the library. Because the two of them are alone, Knoll feels emboldened to lay a hand on his prince’s shoulder. To draw the taller of them into a tentative, hesitant hug, and think. Without knowing the specifics it would be impossible to plan a way to rectify this. 

Was the Emperor dead? No, it couldn’t be, not in the course of one night. Not something so devastating, personally and nationally, could leave Knoll so isolated in knowledge. Someone, and not the prince, would have screamed it on every inch of Gradoan soil. If he were dead.

There were many things that were possibly worse than death.

“Prince Lyon,” Knoll says, drawing away to look back up into the stricken face. He doesn’t pull away entirely, hand still closed around some of the excess fabric of Lyon’s sleeve, an anchoring point to remind Lyon that Knoll is still here, supporting him. “Please, what happened?” 

“ _ He’s ill _ ,” Lyon answers. Dropping the words like boulders from a height, they crash around the pair of them with devastating effect. The tone alone tells Knoll everything he thinks he might even want to ask about. The prognosis, the time the emperor has left, how Lyon is handling the news. 

Knoll wants to say, “ _ I love you, I am here for you, Prince Lyon don’t lose hope. _ ” But instead he waits, still as though he is carved from rock, and waits. There is nothing he can say that will wipe that despair from every pore of Lyon’s body, and to say something and fail to make it better would be worse. Lyon trusts him to speak with purpose, with intent. Careful and perhaps too slow, yes, but still. He would not cause his prince more harm.

After tortuous heartbeats, Lyon folds in on himself, dropping into one of the chairs at the desk and hiding his tired, tortured expression behind his hands. “I don’t know how to save him.” It’s possibly the one confession that Knoll didn’t expect. It implies  _ I’ve tried everything _ , it explains the dark, exhausted shadows under Lyon’s eyes. Kindly Emperor Vigarde, known for his kindness, and his soft-centered son...to part them so violently would do...heavy damage to the survivor.

It  _ was _ doing heavy damage to Lyon, and the Emperor wasn’t even dead, yet.

Knoll kneels, and coaxes a hand from his prince, and holds it gently. Like a fragile bird, or perhaps like his own heart. What knowledge had Prince Lyon sought, while Knoll was asleep in his research, to be so sure his father’s death inevitable? No, just because clerics and his prince’s desperate grasp for a lifeline against the coming tragedy had not come up with a way, did not mean it didn’t exist. 

“Then let our wills be united then, in this, Prince Lyon,” he says, instead of soft, tenderhearted declarations. Lyon looks up, and for the first time this morning, he thinks Lyon actually sees him. Sees loyal, devoted Knoll, and not the ghosts of a future yet to pass. “We will find your lord father a cure.” Knoll insists, quiet but firm. 

It might not be inside these walls, or inside the Dark Stone’s temple. It might not even lie inside the borders of Grado!! They had time, not a lot of it, but they had some. They could search the entire continent over. Knoll would not rest, until this horror was lifted from Lyon’s shoulders. He was quietly, but seriously devoted to Lyon, and it would go deeply against the grain of his existence to abandon the prince now.

“Where have you looked?” He asks, still holding Lyon’s hand, not daring to stroke the back of it soothingly. A whirlwind of activity sweeps the two of them up. Nights spent burning candles until a pool of liquid wax, almost flat against the base of the plate, smothers the flame and leaves them both in darkness. Until another candle is lit, and so on, until the sun rises. 

Fingers tracing rows and rows of words in books almost too old to safely handle, mentions of the sickness plaguing Vigarde chased to dead end after dead end. Knoll sends out letters to scholars in other nations, phrasing it as an intellectual exercise, following Lyon’s wishes. The world will not know how the Emperor is failing. His trusted generals will not know the Emperor is failing. 

Lyon closes the capitol to his friends, too absorbed in his search with Knoll for answers, for the cure Knoll cannot promise is out there, for a miracle. And the discovery of the Dark Stone’s power’s extent...Knoll fears that Lyon’s focus has shifted. After the first short-lived resurrection, Lyon frequently will sit, and stare out windows towards the temple, and a hardness to his expression is common.

“When we fail,” Lyon says, one day as Knoll mechanically sorts through notes and answers to his letters of inquiry. Startled, he stares at his prince, horrified. To hear such despair, when before they had both been set afire with their determination! “No, Knoll.  _ When _ we fail,” he says, exhaustion rendering the resignation cold. “Who will shepherd our people when the disaster comes?” 

The disaster they had found, when searching the ripples in the stream of time for hints against the more personal disaster of losing the emperor. 

Knoll does not want to answer. Clearly Lyon thinks it won’t be him, that it will not be the prince who takes the reigns from his own father. Blood cold in his veins, Knoll reaches for Lyon. Shaking, exhausted hands find Lyon’s cold, still ones. The prince is so cold, from his hands to the bleakness in his eyes. He expects an answer, as he sits and regards Knoll with sharp eyes and a meanness to the furrow of his eyebrows and with a defeated slump to his shoulders.

He cannot answer. He will not answer. Knoll will not answer that heavy look with the reassurance that the empire will go on without Vigarde and without Lyon. That the generals will be forewarned, and that being forewarned is forearmed. That heavy look frightens him, and again he drags down softer and unrelated, useless, declarations. ( _ I love you  _ won’t make Lyon feel hope, when all but the faintest spark has been extinguished in his chest.)

“The libraries, the Dark Stone, nothing has helped us.” he says instead, releasing his prince and reaching for one of his letters, and standing. “Prince Lyon, I suggest you give the generals an update on our Emperor’s condition, and allow them to take the country from you and your father’s hands. Perhaps the relief of stress will give Emperor Vigarde more time.” (Perhaps the new openness, without the secret of his illness, will allow Emperor Vigarde to focus more on recovering.) Lyon watches him begin pacing, and perhaps Knoll is imagining it, but color seems to come back, just a little, to Lyon’s complexion.

“We should take our search to Rausten.” Knoll says, halting in his tracks, and hands over the paper. “I believe they could help us there.” 

Lyon’s cold hands brush his, and the prince reads the words there on the page with little break in his expression. He does not wring his hands while Lyon reads, but he does shift anxiously, the swish of his robes against the floor a comfort. When the prince looks up, Knoll feels comforted to see a brightening expression. 

“This says they have heard of it, heard of my father’s illness.” Lyon says, and there’s life in his voice and he moves more animatedly than before, and oh. Knoll has missed seeing his prince looking alive. He has missed seeing that spark of passion and hope. That is the man Knoll loves. “They say,” and Lyon brings the letter to his chest and turns on the spot to face the northward window. “They say they have records, in Castle Rausten.” 

Knoll comes to stand by his side, and Lyon reaches out to grab Knoll’s hand, squeezes it tightly. “They have, they have…” Turning to face his trusted mage, Lyon’s eyes are bright. “They could help us save him.” For the first time in months, the desperation weighing him down is lifted, and Knoll can only watch as Lyon comes back to life. 

“We have to go.” He says, echoing Knoll’s suggestion. “We have to go,” And suddenly Knoll is packing. Traveling things and ink and paper and knowing that in another room Lyon is addressing the generals. Vigarde’s Precious Stones, gathered for their gentle, kind hearted prince, learning for the first time the dire state of their lord.

He carries his packs to a stable, late at night, Lyon meeting him there with the Fluorspar. She smiles at him kindly, in greeting, and returns back to checking the horses. Perhaps the prince sees Knoll’s worry, his anxiety at the stranger, because he offers up, “Obsidian and Sunstone will carry the nation while we are gone.” Lyon says, looking thinner than usual without the billowing robes he prefers. Riding clothes, Knoll had known he was forgetting something.

“Selena Fluorspar comes with us,” And from the slant of Lyon’s mouth, Knoll knows she is someone who would not see them come to harm. A person who would stand between them and the search for knowledge until they had eaten and slept. A hindrance, true, but also a great help. How much faster would they have known of Rausten’s knowledge, if they had rested enough to avoid reading the same texts twice or three times over, too tired to take in the words they were supposed to be absorbing? If they hadn’t faded slowly as the time between meals had grown too great?

It is too late to wonder about such things, is what he tells himself, though the temptation to entertain the what-ifs is stronger than he’d like. 

With Selena occupied, Lyon crowds Knoll until the two of them are partially hidden from her view. “I’m glad you will be with me.” he says, that fire in his eyes speaking to his determination. He hesitates, clearly hesitates, and then he grips Knoll’s hands. Perhaps a little too tightly to be comfortable, but he initiated the contact, purposefully. Heart beating faster, Knoll thinks of quiet, useless declarations. ( _ I love you, I’ve always and will always support you. Your trust in me is all I could ever ask for, but not all I could ever want. _ ) His prince hesitates, words clearly on the brink of being said, and he squeezes Knoll’s hands and lets up the pressure until it is gentle.

“I’m glad  _ you _ will be with me.” Lyon says again. “I would ask...that you not leave my side.” 

“Prince Lyon,” Knoll whispers, quiet and pointless declarations beating against the inside of his ribs to the pace of his heart, “I would lose my way without you.” This answer must please him, because Lyon gives Knoll his first smile unrelated to Rausten’s revelation. His first smile in months. It makes his knees shake, and it is only his hand in Lyon’s that gives him the strength to stay standing as though his heart isn’t racing and his face isn’t heating up. 

One last squeeze of their joined hands and then Lyon withdraws and moves to one of the horses. He looks at Knoll, whose heart skips a beat at the unclear meaning behind the smile lingering on Lyon’s face, and then turns to Selena. “We should ride soon, the journey to Rausten will be an adventure, and I’d hate to leave my father waiting.” 

“Very well, my prince.” Says Selena.

“Yes, Prince Lyon.” Says Knoll. 

Packs secured, horses checked, mounted in the saddle with his robes bunched up around his knees so they wouldn’t tangle his feet in the stirrups, Knoll follows behind Lyon as they leave the capitol in Duessel and Glen’s capable hands. At his prince’s side, as is only right, though technically with the way his riding is, he is at his prince’s back.( _ I would ask...that you don’t leave my side. _ )

Joy singing through him, hope coursing through their party, Knoll puts up with the thought of a long and dirty journey. For Emperor Vigarde, for Lyon. _ I would lose my way without you. _


End file.
